


Stages

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Control, Grief, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 12:57:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2851550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The five bereavements of Clara Oswald.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stages

**_1\. Denial_ **

Clara Oswald loves Danny Pink.

_(“Me and Danny,” she says,)_

Clara Oswald is not afraid to cry.

_(“We are going to be fine.”)_

Clara Oswald loves the Doctor.

_(“I’m his best friend,” she says,)_

Clara Oswald has a hero.

_(“And he is the one person I would never, ever lie to.”)_

Clara Oswald does not walk away.

_(She stands back and lets him close the door. She watches him disappear, and she smiles.)_

Clara Oswald needs him to stay.

_(“I’m not Clara Oswald,” she says,)_

Clara Oswald would see that he needs her.

_(“Clara Oswald has never existed.”)_

Clara Oswald would not have let him go.

_(“I’m the Doctor.”)_

Clara Oswald is alright, really.

There are other ways of hiding your face.

***

**_2\. Anger_ **

Her older form is quiet but not attentive. They sit tight-lipped and nervous, they spend her period staring out the window. A bird flies by and takes half of the back row with it, a minor disruption.

_(“Your face is too wide,” says Courtney, arms crossed;  a minor disruption, a joke for the future.)_

Clara clears her throat, and smiles.

Her junior class asks too many questions. They over-think grammar rules, they think homophones are duplicitous. They want to know where people go after they die.

_(“That’s what people do when they’re in love,” says Ruby; precociousness, curiosity, a bright and shining young mind.)_

Clara breathes deep, and answers.

Courtney is late for class for a week. She scribbles furiously in her notebook as Clara speaks, but she leaves her other books at home. When Clara asks for her homework, Courtney says she’d forgotten it.

“I’m really sorry, Miss,” says Courtney, troublemaker Courtney who wouldn’t know a sincere apology if it bit her on the nose. “I’ll bring it tomorrow, I promise.”

_(Courtney scrawls on the walls and the windows; adolescent rebellion, easy and wild.)_

“Miss?” says Courtney, troublemaker Courtney who sneers and scowls and sniggers, Courtney whose every word is tender, concerned, afraid. Courtney, whose voice wobbles.

_(Courtney, who scrawls on the walls: Ozzie loves the Squaddie.)_

Clara wants to scream.

“It’s alright, Courtney,” says Clara. “I know you’re going through a difficult time.”

She slides her hand into her pocket so her class can’t see it tremble. Her TARDIS key burns hot against her palm.

***

**_3\. Bargaining_ **

She knows him, she loves him. She’s held his hand and cupped his cheek and held his shoulders as he cried. She’d followed him to the grave and back. She’d have done it again if he’d asked.

Now she reaches for him but doesn’t touch, and now he is not a man she recognizes. He is here; he is gone.

_(“You remind me of someone,” he’d said, “someone who died.”_

_“I’ll travel with you,” she’d said, “but as me.”)_

He runs, but it’s not the same run. He calls her name but it sounds wrong in his mouth. He is harsher, angrier. His eyes do not soften when he looks at her.

She trusts him and she fears him. She tends him and resents him. She misses who he was, misses the flop of hair and the tender hands, the gangly limbs and big sad eyes. She’s lost her friend, her comfort, her partner in crime. She’s gained a mystery she’s afraid to solve.

_(“Who are you?” he’d asked her, over and over and again._

_“You are,” he’d told her, “the only puzzle worth solving.”)_

He leaves her alone in a foreign time. He leaves her behind a falling door. She stands alone when he would have stood beside her; she reaches out and he has her back.

He speaks in his sleep. He tells her he needs her.

_(“Clara,” he’d called her, “My Clara.”_

_His eyes are harder but they’re searching. His hands are rougher but he holds them out to her. He calls her from his grave; the catch in his voice is the same._

_That has not changed: he is hers. My Doctor.)_

“See me,” he says, pleading and unashamed. “Just see me,” and he doesn’t say it but he doesn’t have to. She hears.

_(See me. Not a ghost. Not a puzzle. Not an impossibility. See **me**.)_

She wraps her arms around him. She keeps her eyes closed.

Turnabout, after all, is fair play.

***

**_4\. Depression_ **

Artie cries, afterward. Artie cries for days. Artie is weeps over breakfast and sobs during lunch, hides in his room during dinner and every in-between. His eyes go from pink to red to perpetually bloodshot, and he hides them out of shame and cries some more.

Clara holds him when his father cannot, makes him cups of hot chocolate. Clara reads to him and leaves boxes of tissues outside his bedroom door. Clara tucks him in the way his mother used to, and she never mentions his reddened eyes or his running nose or his ever-present stream of tears, not even when it stops.

Artie, Clara finds, had been easy.

Angie doesn’t cry. Angie doesn’t rage. Angie sits on her bed, nose stuck in a fashion magazine she’d never had much interest in like it’s the most fascinating thing in the universe, and doesn’t do much of anything at all.

Angie treats Clara like she’s stupid, answers every statement with _what do you know_ like Clara’s never been a teenager, like she’s never hated homework, like she’s never ever felt like everything is too much.

When Clara talks about dead mothers, Angie stares, sullen, but says nothing. Probably she knows better.

Clara’s always loved books, and she buys them now in stacks – books about grief, books about bereavement, books about moving on. _Depression_ , she learns, _is a side-effect of grieving._

She pulls her clothes from her suitcases and hangs them in the cupboards of her guest room. She cancels her plane ticket, returns her new parka and her travel guides and her walking boots. She uses the money to buy more books. They pile up around her room, slotting into new empty spaces in the shelves and covering over the brochures that still litter her desk.

 _Depression_ , Clara reads, _may cause the griever to lose interest in things that had previously mattered to them._

Clara looks at Angie’s dishevelled room, the piles of schoolwork cast aside and never-to-be-done, the friends calling the house only to be hung up on, the suspiciously empty social calendar.

 _Depression_ , thinks Clara, _means giving up_.

“I know,” she tells Angie, “I know it’s hard. I know you must want to stop trying. I understand.”

She waits for the dismissal, for the _what do you know_. She’s ready for it, she thinks. It won’t make her react. It won’t make her defensive. It won’t hurt.

Angie looks at Clara’s travelling coat, hung on the peg on the wall, and nods, and somehow that _does_.

***

**_5\. Acceptance_ **

At age five, Clara’s mommy comes to find her. The crowd is huge and she is so small, and she hugs her knees and sobs until she’s found.

At age seven, Clara’s daddy hugs her as she cries. Her grandma’s casket gives her nightmares, and her parents let her sleep with them for a week, cradling her between them in the night.

At age nine, Clara’s mother coaches her in arithmetic. She tells her secrets, grown-up things like what boys really mean when they yank girls’ pigtails and why it’s okay to be rubbish at maths and how to bite your lip and smile instead of cry. Clara digests these lessons with the earnestness of a disciple, but being strong is hard, and she waits till she gets her mojo back before she tries again.

At age fifteen, Clara stands in front of a gravestone that looms like it’s the only thing on her small horizon, and she realizes she’s finally gone somewhere her mother cannot follow.

At age fifteen, Clara’s father weeps into her chest.

At age fifteen, Clara draws her shoulders back and stands up straighter and thinks, for the first time:  _I can do this._

 _I am,_ Clara decides,  _too old to need someone to come._


End file.
